Generation of Educational 3D Maze Games for Carpet Handicraft in Bulgaria

Abstract

Serious video games applied for learning purposes play a significant and important role for the modern technology enhanced education. The paper presents an educational 3D maze video game dedicated to the development of carpet fabrication in Bulgaria since 17 th century until modern days. The game was automatically generated by means of declarative description of the maze processed by an open software tool named Maze Builder and built on top of Unity game platform and specially designed for automatic generation and easy modification of maze video games. There are explained the maze game design process, the educational tasks embedded into the maze, and a practical experiment conducted with the generated game. The initial results obtained from these experiments are very positive and encouraging with regard of playability of such educational mazes and, as well, concerning their easy and straightforward generation by educators, who are not IT professionals.

Towards Automatic Generation of Serious Maze Games for Education

“…Many of the latest approaches for game-based education rely on using serious games with mazes for educational purposes [14,15,17]. Mazes are broadly used in entertainment games and that makes them very appropriate for interactive representation of content, where the player chooses one of the several options for an action.…”

“…For applying maze games for education, educators with no IT skills need software platforms for an easy and automatized construction of hierarchical video mazes for their curricula. Such platforms should be customizable, i. e., teachers should be able to customize maze nodes with their preferred content [15]. At this moment, only some rather simple tools for creation of mazes are available.…”

“…The case study followed a scenario for measuring how easy and effectively educators can use the platform to generate educational games. An additional case study was conducted for assessing the playability of the generated educational games [15].…”

“…In order to test and validate the usability of the platform, we created an experimental 3D video game supporting education in Bulgarian ethnography [15]. The game is focused on carpet manufacturing in Bulgaria since the 17 th century to modern days.…”

“…In fact, any digital game has some learning aspects; however, educational games intentionally embed learning content, elements of instructional design and interactions meaningful in a learning context. For example, the didactic contents of any curriculum can be easily structured in hierarchical mazes, where a section or a cycle of the maze represents a module of the curriculum [14,15].…”